Writer finds hidden truths of World War II

Most critically, Conlee says, MacArthur failed to move 50 million bushels of rice from Luzon to the battle areas of Bataan. It could have fed U.S. and Filipino troops for years. This huge blunder caused starvation among the defenders and hastened the surrender and the subsequent Bataan Death March.

Roosevelt gave MacArthur a pass for his unaccountable lapses because he believed the country was in dire need of white-charger heroes. The general was to that manner born. He raked in adulation like small change.

He probably deserved the nickname “Dugout Doug” for his refusal to visit the troops on the Bataan Peninsula during the battle.

“It was stupid of him. It was a bad PR move, because he wasn’t a coward or anything like that. He had fought at the front with his troops in World War I. On Corregidor, he would stand out in the open and watch Japanese planes attack when everybody else said, ‘Take cover, general!’ ”

• MacArthur earlier had tempted criticism by taking a Filipino mistress, Isabel Rosario, to Washington, D.C., with him before the war when he returned in the ’30s to be Army chief of staff.

Prominent columnist Drew Pearson got wind of the relationship and was going to publish it when MacArthur bribed him into silence, Conlee says. Though the general was single at the time, he feared what his mother might think. “MacArthur was a momma’s boy.”

• MacArthur was an overweening, egotistical pain in the nether regions, but he also gets a bum rap for the many good things he did, Conlee believes.

“MacArthur’s arrogant demeanor has denied him credit for devising the island-hopping strategy on the march up the Pacific toward Japan.”

MacArthur was opposed to the 1944 bloody landing on the island of Peleliu as unnecessary. “(Marine) Gen. Roy Geiger, who commanded the operation, predicted it would take three days. It took 45.”

I posed a counterfactual question to Conlee and asked what MacArthur would have done had he commanded in Europe. He says, “MacArthur always went around the enemy. He thought the European commanders were stupid with all their frontal battles and high casualty rates in the sweep across France and on into Germany.

“Whether he could have done better and maneuvered better, we can’t know. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have advanced on a broad front as Eisenhower did. He would have probed for weak points and tried to punch through, kind of like (British Field Marshal Bernard) Montgomery and (Gen. George) Patton wanted.”

• In Europe, “Gen. William Simpson’s 9th Army crossed the Elbe on April 12, 1945, and was less than 50 miles from Berlin with meager opposition between. Churchill was furious when Eisenhower told Simpson to stop there and not push on to Berlin. Churchill wanted the western allies to have the glory of taking the German capital, but Ike wouldn’t have it. Obviously, a political decision had been made by Roosevelt to allow the Soviets the honor. Roosevelt, incidentally, died that same day.”

• Although massacres of POWs and civilians were common during the war (Malmedy, against Americans; Chenogne, against Germans) one obscure massacre might have been racial, Conlee says.